Shipbuilding in Wurm Online
Ships have several important uses in Wurm Online. They are a great way to travel around the Wurm Online lands as a lot of villages are located at the seashore which makes sea travel between villages a great thing. They are also great for transporting large amounts of items and materials and are essential for trade between villages. Finally, ships are the only way to travel between the servers to reach new continents.
If you are in need of a single ship you can usually buy it from other players who have specialized in their construction, it’s easier and much, much faster. If you however intend to make shipbuilding a career you should read the rest of this page.
Building Your First Ship.
To build a ship you need to start by getting your woodcutting skill up a bit for raw materials, if you haven’t already got it at around 20 or so you should chop down a few trees and make kindling for your village or planks for your own house. Besides, owning your own little cottage is much more important than owning a ship so you should start with that anyway.
The best way to increase your shipbuilding skill as a beginner is to start by constructing the components needed to build a rowing boat. The rowing boat is the smallest ship that you can construct in Wurm Online followed by the sailing boat.
Before you start you want to have a bulk storage bin set up to store the materials you create until you are ready to build the rowing boat itself.
The necessary components to build a rowing boat are:
- 50x pegs
- 50x tenons
- 50x hull planks
- 10x tars
- 4x seats
- 3x keel sections
- 2x oars
- 1x rope
- 1x stern
You should start off by making pegs (carving knife on a shaft), hull planks (saw on a log), and tenons (carving knife on a log). Remember to have your sleep bonus turned on while creating these ship components to get quicker skill gains. This is important for your first shipbuilding levels.
To get tar, you either need to get some from other players or find a tar pit in the wild. You can see the rough location of tar pits on the community map for your server.
At around shipbuilding 10-15, you can start making keel sections (hatchet on a felled tree), seats (saw on a log), and oars (saw on a log) with a decent success rate. The final piece is a rope, which is made by using a rope-making tool on wemp fiber and the stern which is made from:
- 20x Pegs
- 11x Hull planks
- 10x Tenons
Note that these are in addition to the ones listed above. The total amount of pegs is 70, hull planks is 61 and tenons is 60.
It’s best to construct the ship at the seashore, however, rowboats can be created in a cart and moved to shore just before you put the final piece in. There is also a specialized cart called ship transport that can move ships from inland to the shore. When you have completed the ship, you will receive a writ in your inventory which allows you to manage access settings to the ship.
Another thing you should make (if you can) is a mooring rope and anchor. You can create a rowboat without those, but it is much better to have those included.
Boat Lock and Mooring Rope.
Every ship you build should also be equipped with a boat lock and mooring anchor. The boat lock ensures that you can store items safely on the ship and the mooring anchor allows you to moor the ship so it won’t drift off. The boat lock is made from iron and requires the locksmithing skill, the mooring anchor is made from wemp using the rope making skill. The mooring rope then needs an anchor which is created from lead using the blacksmith skill.
When you complete your ship you get a writ where you can set who can use the ship, such as friends, villagers, or alliance members.
Sails and Ropes
If you want to make larger ships than a rowboat you need to either have someone make you sails and ropes or be able to create them on your own. Sails are made from cotton and to make them you use the cloth-making skill. There are several types of sails which require a different level of skill to construct. The general rule of thumb is that the bigger the ship, the larger and more complex sails are needed.
Ropes are made from wemp plants and require the rope making skill and as with sails, the bigger the ship the more ropes are required.
The easiest ship to build after the rowboat would be a small sailing boat. It has almost the same material requirements as a rowboat with the added need for sails.
Skills Needed for Ship building
To be able to create a small sailing boat or larger ships on your own you will need decent skills in the following categories for good results. Most of these skills are useful for other applications as well.
- Shipbuilding: Used when you make parts that are directly for ship construction
- Cloth-making: Used to make sails for ships.
- Blacksmithing: Needed for the lead anchor.
- Locksmithing: Needed for the boat lock.
- Ropemaking: Used to construct rope for the mooring rope.
- Farming (for raw materials): Used to create cotton for sails and wemp for ropes. Higher skill means better quality cotton and wemp can be harvested, resulting in better quality sails and ropes.
- Woodcutting (for raw materials): Used to cut down trees for wood. Higher skill means better quality wood from the tree.
Selling Your Ships
If you have a ready-made ship you can advertise it in the appropriate chat channels or on the Wurm Online forums. You should be able to get a decent offer for it rather soon. They are time-consuming to construct and are therefore in some demand.
Having a mooring anchor and boat lock already installed will make it much easier to sell. However, ships without those components also sell at a discount.